From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,7f4d16c4ee371eb5 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Robert A Duff Subject: Re: Why is it Called a Package? Date: 2000/03/27 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 603142785 Sender: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff) References: <38DF7F38.8D656ABD@lmtas.lmco.com> <38DFB0BC.9FF72EFC@callnetuk.com> Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-03-27T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Nick Roberts writes: > One answer might be: because a word had to be chosen. Now (if you really > want to ruffle some feathers ;-) I'm not sure why this stuff should ruffle feathers, but you might be right. ;-) Certainly trivial issues cause the most discussion, perhaps because everybody can understand the issues. >... ask why 'all' was chosen as the word to > signify dereferencing (hardly intuitive), why 'others' was chosen as the > the word to signify a default value for choices (not very intuitive > when, as is quite commonly done, it is the only choice), or why, for > that matter, any language uses the words and/or terms 'loop' and > 'iteration', when the words 'repeat' and 'repetition' would be easier > and more obvious (and 'do' must be the least intuitive of all). FWIW, I don't like ".all" -- I prefer Pascal's "^". If it weren't such a big ugly thing, it wouldn't need to be optional -- I like being explicit about pointer dereferencing, because it has important semantics, but I never write ".all" except in the few cases where it's required, and then grudgingly. "Others" seems fine to me, although I must admit that when I first learned Ada in 1980 or so, I was confused by the others-only case -- I remember asking an expert if something like "(others => 'x')" was legal. I prefer Pascal's "while ... do" to Ada's "while ... loop", although I wouldn't like "do ... end do;". I would prefer "while ... do ... end while;" and "loop ... end loop;". Also "for ... do ... end for;". Pascal has "repeat ... until". > Of course, for all those poor souls whose native language is not > English, but who must program (Ada and other languages) in English, ... such as Jean Ichbiah himself! ;-) ... > perhaps you'd better not ask about words being 'intuitive' after all. > Imagine it! Ouch. They have my sympathy. Yes, I imagine that's painful. There was a discussion on comp.lang.misc a couple of months ago, where somebody was trying to design a language that had no keywords -- the point being to avoid the problem of non-English speakers being confused by English words. Even the playing field. Everything was done with squiggly-looking punctuation characters. To me, it looked like C, only less readable. The language designer was not a native English speaker (although his posts were in English, and were perfectly understandable to me). - Bob